Star Solder is a vertically scrolling shooter developed
by Hudson Soft for the Famicom and MSX home computer
in 1986.
It was the fourteenth best selling Famicom game released in 1986,
selling approximately one million copies in its lifetime. While it
is the first in a series of games to bear the Star Soldier title,
it is considered the second in what's known as the Caravan shooting
collection, the first being Star Force. Back when Hudson Soft was a big name
in the video game industry of Japan, they ran a nationwide video
game tournament known as the "Hudson All-Japan Caravan Festival"
where players competed against one another in the popular shooting
genre.

Star Soldier itself doesn't offer a tremendous amount of
innovation, and not every concept that was introduced works
flawlessly. For example, Star Soldier allows the players to duck
under the terrain (by means that the player has relatively little
control over) which makes the player invincible, but it also
prevents the player from attacking and it can occur at the worst
possible times, so its effectiveness is debatable. However, Star
Soldier does feature a rather intriguing power-up system that
ultimately allows for the player's ship to fire rapidly in five
different directions at one time.

Star Soldier also contains a number of hidden items like bonus
point tiles and power up tiles, some of which will only appear when
certain conditions are properly met. The stage bosses would flee
and send you backwards through the stage if you did not destroy
them quickly enough the first time that you encountered them. The
game was quite popular in Japan, but less so in the rest of the
world. While sequels to the Star Soldier series were made, they
have little to do with one another other than being vertically
scrolling shooters with amazing power ups.

Star Soldier was first remade in 1995, along with two other NES
shooters with very little upgraded, for the SNES in the Japan-only release
of the Caravan Shooting Collection. In
2003, a 3D remake of the game was released for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube, but it was not entirely
faithful to the original game. An upgraded version of this remake
was released for the PSP in 2005. In 2004, Star Soldier was included
as one of the 30 NES games to be released for the Game Boy Advance as part of the Famicom Mini
series. It was also included in Hudson's own compilation of Famicom
shooters in 2006 in Hudson Best Collection Vol.
5.